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In 1896, the Supreme Court decided Plessy v. Ferguson, upholding a Louisiana law that required railroads to segregate passengers by race. It was one of the darkest moments in the Court’s history, a ruling that it took America, in court decisions and legislation, more than half a century to reverse. But amid the majority’s acceptance of segregation, one justice refused to go along with the majority. John Marshall Harlan wrote a dissent that would echo through the ages: “Our Constitution is color-blind and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.” (See Colorblindness and Blindness to Color; The Constitution is Colorblind—So Why Do Democrats Insist that the Country is White Supremacist?)

Harlan’s lone opinion was more than an act of moral courage (although this it certainly was—and remains so today). It was a defense of the core logic of the American Constitution—that equality and liberty belong to individuals, not racial categories. When the law divides citizens by color (or other arbitrary characteristics), it denies that principle. Only when it treats them as equal bearers of rights, of immunities, liberties, and privileges, does it fulfill it. “There is no caste here,” Harlan writes of United States, “In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law.”

That simple but profound insight is worth recalling today, as the Supreme Court debates the meaning of equality and race under the Voting Rights Act, which was signed into law in 1965, a year after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act that ended de jure segregation. On October 15, the Court heard arguments in Louisiana v. Callais, a case testing whether Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) permits race-based districting to remedy vote dilution. The justices’ questioning suggested to observers that the Court’s conservative majority is prepared to narrow the scope of the Act, focusing on how long race-conscious remedies can persist and whether they must meet stricter constitutional scrutiny. This is a welcome development to those who believe in the founding principles of the American Republic.

Section 2 of the VRA “[p]rohibits any voting qualification or prerequisite to voting, or standard, practice, or procedure, that denies or abridges the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color.” Section 5, which required certain jurisdictions with a history of discrimination to obtain federal preclearance before changing voting laws or practices, was effectively invalidated by the Supreme Court in 2013 in Shelby County v. Holder. It seems logical that Section 2 is the next to fall in the Court’s project to align state law with the US Constitution and democratic republican principle.

The hearing has drawn intense public attention, with many observers warning that weakening Section 2 could undermine one of the last major federal protections for minority voting rights. But what we should be asking is why the VRA is allowed to stand at all in light of the fact that the People already have the Fifteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, which states, “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” From this, it follows that any “voting qualification or prerequisite to voting, or standard, practice, or procedure, that denies or abridges the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color” (the language of the VRA) should be ruled unconstitutional based on the Reconstruction Amendment. In the immediate aftermath of the contentious 1964 Civil Rights Act, the VRA may have been necessary. But today? It is hard to see why.

Amid the promising tone of the hearing on Wednesday, there was a moment that stood out in particular. During questioning, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson drew a comparison that shocked many of those listening. It certainly got my attention. In discussing the Act’s Section 2, Jackson likened the position of black Americans to that of disabled Americans who cannot climb stairs. The law, she suggested, must recognize that both groups face barriers to equal participation—and therefore require differential treatment to achieve genuine equality. She thus invoked the principle of equity as it is currently conceptualized in the woke progressive epistemic.

“Going back to this discriminatory intent point, and the fact that remedial action, absent discriminatory intent, is really not a new idea in civil rights laws. And my paradigmatic example of this is something like the ADA,” Jackson said. “Congress passed the Americans with Disabilities Act against the backdrop of a world that was generally not accessible to people with disabilities. And so, it was discriminatory, in effect, because these folks were not able to access these buildings, and it didn’t matter whether the person who built the building, or the person who owned the building, intended for them to be exclusionary. That’s irrelevant.”

She continued, implicitly and conveniently shifting to the original meaning of the equity principle: “Congress said the facilities have to be made equally open to people with disabilities, if readily possible. I guess I don’t understand why that’s not what’s happening here.” She shifted back to the woke meaning when she interpreted Section 2 to mean that the government “is responding to current-day manifestations of past and present decisions that disadvantaged minorities,” and to “make it so they now have equal access to the voting system, right? They’re disabled.” Here she collapses the analogy into the thing itself. Black Americans are disabled.

That last line about black Americans being “disabled” is what caught everyone’s attention. But the argument is, in its entirety, fallacious. It commits something I have written about many times on this platform, what in informal logic is known as the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, that is, the error of mistaking an abstraction for a concrete fact. We see this in the antiracist rhetoric about “white privilege” and “systemic racism,” which manufactures the illusions that all whites enjoy the advantages suggested by average group differences—and that all blacks are the victims of racism based on the same statistics. (See Race and Democracy; The Origin and Character of Antiracist Politics; Committing the Crime it Condemns; Equity and Social Justice: Rationalizing Unjust Enrichment; The New Left’s War on Imaginary Structures of Oppression in Order to Hide the Real Ones; Critical Race Theory: A New Racism.)

For people with physical disabilities, the barrier is specific and universal. A set of stairs excludes every person who cannot climb them. No matter one’s education, social standing, or wealth, the obstacle is concrete. Equity—in its original, legal sense—demands an accommodation, such as an elevator or a ramp, to ensure equal access. Thus, an accommodation is made to achieve equality of opportunity under circumstances of a preexisting and categorical inequality: a disability. Equality of opportunity is a species of substantive equality, which, in the case of disability, involves treating people differently to achieve equality. Contrast this principle to formal equality, which means treating everyone the same under the law without regard for individual differences or social situation. While other expressions of substantive equality may be impermissible, for instance, the goal of equality of outcome (see Kurt Vonnegut’s short story “Harrison Bergeron” for an illustration of the perils of such attempts), a good society would make such an accommodation for the disabled to make any claim to decency.

Race is not like that. There is no inherent incapacity attached to being black or white, nor any uniform barrier that exists today that affects all members of one race in the same way. When disparities arise—for example, in voter ID possession rates, a favorite argument of progressives—they reflect complex social factors, not a shared intrinsic limitation. Some black Americans face real obstacles; others do not. The same is true for whites. Think about it: if poverty or lack of education and information affect poor blacks, these also affect poor whites. To assume that what is statistically true of a group is concretely true of every individual within it is to confuse demographics with destiny, abstraction with concrete individuals. Moreover, if states are to consider complex social factors, why would they focus on race and not the social factors themselves? Would not, in the case of voter ID, all races benefit from a policy that helped the economically disadvantaged obtain the necessary proof required for securing our elections? (Of course, but opposition to voter ID is not about electoral integrity, but about making it easier to rig elections.)

The critical question is whether voting rights is a case where equity even applies. Equity, properly understood, is about correcting for relevant, material differences. It recognizes that strict uniformity can sometimes produce injustice—as when identical treatment ignores a physical limitation that makes equal participation impossible. We see this also in the necessity of gender-segregation in sports (another matter that I have devoted considerable time to on this platform). Given the intrinsic and categorical differences between females and males in a sexually dimorphic species that has reached sapience, it has been recognized that it is discriminatory to treat women and men the same. Equality, in contrast, is about treating individuals the same where there is no relevant concrete difference. The challenge of justice is knowing when to invoke one principle rather than the other. Jackson’s analogy applies the logic of equity—appropriate to disability or gender—to a realm where equality, not accommodation, is the governing ideal. This was Justice Harlan’s argument. This is why his dissent resonates down through history. And should for all time.

Jackson’s confusion carries profound constitutional implications. As I explain to my students in the first lecture of my course Freedom and Social Control, the American system, as well as classical liberalism more generally, is grounded in what philosophers call negative liberty: freedom from government-imposed barriers or classifications. Individuals are not free to make of themselves what they will under the rule of law if the government shapes decisions for them on the basis of race or some other supposed difference that has no basis in material fact. The Reconstruction Amendments, particularly the Fifteenth, embody that idea. The Fifteenth Amendment declares that the right to vote shall not be denied or abridged on account of race. It does not require proportional outcomes; it forbids racial exclusion. It is a bulwark against interference, not a tool for engineering representation. Putting this another way, the Amendment forbids manufacturing proportional outcomes for a suspect category.

What is a “suspect category”? This is a legal term used in US constitutional law to describe a class of people who have historically been subjected to discrimination and are, therefore, entitled to heightened judicial protection when laws classify or discriminate against them. This is understandable and, in terms of the logic of our constitutional republic, it means ensuring that there are no discriminatory barriers placed before citizens who have suffered past discrimination that would harm their life chances in the present and future. It does not mean that the role of government is to disadvantage those who did not suffer past discrimination. Ibram X. Kendi’s formulations, in his book How to Be an Antiracist, that “[t]he only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination” and that “[t]he only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination,” are antithetical to the principles that established the American Republic. This is the logic of antiracism, an Orwellian inversion that Justice Jackson smuggles into her cross-examination.

Consider that the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was written to enforce the constitutional command of the Fifteenth Amendment. The section at issue, Section 2, was meant to stop states from imposing voting rules that would discriminate by race, which was a problem at the time. But over time, with the growing influence of woke progressive ideology in legal theory, interpretations of the statute drifted toward a different goal: ensuring racial groups elect candidates of their choice in approximate proportion to their population. That shift transforms the Act from a guarantor of individual access into an instrument of racial balancing. It changes a law against discrimination into a law of electoral design. That is flatly unconstitutional.

That is why Jackson’s analogy matters. By equating racial disparities with physical disabilities, she implies that race itself is a condition the state must always accommodate through special privileging, in this case through race-conscious districting or representation. The failure of the state to do this is prima facie discrimination. The logical end of that reasoning is a political system permanently organized by color—the very thing Harlan warned against. Harlan understood that the law cannot be neutral toward racial classification if it is to remain neutral toward citizens, which is the demand of the Constitution.

Harlan’s vision is not naïve. He did not believe that prejudice would vanish from private life. But he rightly insisted that the law must stand above it. Indeed, prejudice (an attitude) is not the same as discrimination (an action or inaction, under specific and unjust conditions). The Constitution, Harlan writes, “neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.” In that simple declaration lies a whole philosophy of government—our philosophy of government: that the state’s duty is to secure equal rights, not to equalize outcomes. It must remove barriers, not rearrange voters into racial blocs. Indeed, to arrange voters into racial blocs is a manifestation of the separate-but-equal principle that Harlan exposes as racially discriminatory in his dissent!

Hence, Jackson’s unclever and fallacious analogy. When Jackson likens black Americans to disabled Americans, she shifts the moral terrain from one of equal treatment to one of special treatment, that is, to an exclusive privilege wrapped in the rhetoric of civil rights. It is not that special treatment is intrinsically wrong, but it must apply in relevant cases where there is a need for an accommodation, not to ideological or political projects seeking to engineer outcomes. The goal of any accommodation is to create equality of opportunity, not equality of results, the latter being the goal of the ideological redefinition of equity.

The problem with applying the equity principle for ideological reasons is not only philosophical but practical. It invites the state to decide which groups are in the abstract “disadvantaged.” In the conscious use of racial classifications in decision-making, this necessarily negates colorblindness, which, in the present-day project of addressing historical wrongs, systematically disadvantages whites—admittedly the goal for many who take this position. This is what lies behind the claim that colorblindness is by default discriminatory (yet another Orwellian inversion). “We all see color,” we’re told. Yes, but the principle of colorblindness is not asking us to ignore color, but demanding that we don’t use color as a basis for privileging some over others. To privilege some over others based on race is the definition of racial discrimination.

The just path for America is, therefore, the one Harlan outlines in his dissent: to regard every citizen as a bearer of the same rights and the same dignity before the law. That doesn’t mean ignoring the history of discrimination or the persistence of inequality. It means addressing those wrongs and current-day problems through remedies that respect the individual rather than reify the group. It means ensuring that every person, regardless of race, can register, vote, and have their ballot counted, not guaranteeing that each racial group will have representation in proportion to its numbers. To do the latter constitutes racial balkanization, i.e., the fragmentation of a society into often—and almost guaranteed—antagonistic groups based primarily on race or ethnicity, rather than shared civic or national identity. This is why the principle of “separate but equal” in the case of race was (one would have thought) finally recognized as an intrinsically unequal standard in practice. Such a principle can only be applied to material categories such as disability and gender without being unjustly discriminatory.

The distinction may seem technical to many, but it speaks to the heart of the American promise. The Constitution was designed to protect freedom by limiting the reach of government classifications. Again, its liberty is largely negative in that it forbids coercion, restrains power, and draws lines the state may not cross. The VRA, interpreted in that light, interpreted in the light of the Fifteenth Amendment, remains a notable achievement of American democracy—a law that expanded opportunity, not one that rearranges seats. But when it became a vehicle for race-based districting or quota-like expectations, it betrayed the very colorblind ideal it was meant to secure. And, in light of its misuse and guaranteed future misuse, much of it should be gutted by the Court. This must be done to prevent states from racially gerrymandering districts for partisan political advantage. This must be done to end the Democratic practice of racially antagonizing the American population through policies of racial separation, an antagonism the Party has used since its founding in 1828.

Again, Harlan foresees this tension (after all, he had history in his rearview mirror). In his dissent, he warns that “[t]he thin disguise of ‘equal’ accommodations for passengers in railroad coaches will not mislead anyone, nor atone for the wrong this day done. Such a system is inconsistent with the equality of rights which pertains to citizenship, and tends to keep alive a feeling of race hostility and distrust between large classes of our fellow-citizens.” He writes that this is “as obnoxious as the legislation that imposed the badges of servitude upon the colored race rather than the white.” These words are prophetic. Segregation did not foster harmony; it entrenched division. A modern jurisprudence that sorts voters by race, even in the name of fairness, repeats the same mistake in a new form. It tells Americans that political identity begins with color—that representation must be measured by pigmentation, not persuasion. It allows Democrats, contrary to the principle of “one person, one vote,” to exploit black Americans as servants in a partisan project to amass political power.

Perhaps, then, a deeper irony in progressive desire, if we accept the rhetoric of its politics on its face, is that this approach undermines the moral authority of the civil rights movement itself. The triumph of that movement lay in its appeal to a universal principle: equal treatment under law. When Martin Luther King Jr. dreamed that his children would be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character, he wasn’t calling for equitable accommodations by race (at least not in the dream he articulated in his famous 1963 speech at the feet of the Lincoln Memorial). He was reaffirming Harlan’s colorblind ideal in moral terms. Some readers may find it odd that it’s the conservative and not the so-called liberal in this argument that is respecting the principle of colorblind equality, but, as I have explained on this platform, today’s conservative is, in many respects, yesterday’s liberal. The progressive has generally abandoned liberalism altogether. Indeed, progressives, corrupted by postmodernist philosophy, have rejected the idea that any principle can be universal.

To uphold Justice Harlan’s vision today—and it is a vision rooted in the American way—is not to deny history or injustice; it is to insist that the remedy for unjust discrimination is not more classification but its abolition in its entirety. The state has no legitimate interest in considering a citizen’s race when it allocates benefits, draws district lines, or guards the ballot box. Its only duty is to guarantee that every citizen can participate on equal terms, and to apply the equity principle only where there are firm material grounds to do so, such as in the case of disability. On what grounds districts are to be drawn is a problem for state legislatures, as the Constitution permits, but the solution cannot be based on race, which the Constitution forbids.

We might be charitable and excuse Justice Jackson’s intentions as decent and honorable. She seeks a society in which racial inequality no longer distorts opportunity or political power. So do I. But good intentions do not guarantee sound reasoning—and, frankly, I don’t believe her intentions are good in the first place. Based on everything I’ve heard from Jackson, she is firmly grounded in the injustice sought by progressive and racial reordering of American life. And she seeks this at the same time she agrees with the queer activist that women’s rights should yield to the doctrine of gender identity! By conflating concrete disabilities with abstract demographics, Jackson turns a principle of access into a policy of racial engineering. And she does so for the sake of her ideological and partisan commitments.

Justice Harlan understood this better than most. His dissent in Plessy is not just a protest against one law but a defense of an enduring truth: that in a free republic, the rights of citizens do not depend on their race. That truth should and must still guide us if we seek a just society. Failing to follow that truth is the source of injustice found in the history of racial discrimination, an injustice that has for too long kept the nation from the promise of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, which stated as self-evident truths “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” The Constitution Harlan accurately describes—colorblind and focused on individuality—remains the best hope for genuine equality in a diverse nation.

In the end, Jackson was correct when she said, “I guess I don’t understand why that’s not what’s happening here.” They teach her confusion in our nation’s law schools, curricula corrupted by the fallacious logic and racism inherent in critical race theory, which is the basis of antiracism, a euphemism for anti-whiteness, preached by Kendi and his ilk. Such teachings are designed to produce legal scholars who feign not to understand why the ADA is entirely different from the VRA (who conflate Title VII with Title IX, as I showed in my last essay), who confuse categories based on universal conditions versus abstract categories based on ideological reifications. For many, such is the depth of their indoctrination, they are not pretending to grasp the difference; they genuinely believe that there is an analogy to be found there.

I want to close with the words of Justice Harlan, words Justice Jackson and her ilk should consider and, ideally, take to heart: “The destinies of the two races, in this country, are indissolubly linked together, and the interests of both require that the common government of all shall not permit the seeds of race hate to be planted under the sanction of law.” It’s time to move beyond the attempt to revise the past that progressives believe the VRA still represents. The past cannot be changed. And we are several decades beyond it. Its legacy cannot be repaired by present-day discrimination. Whatever effects history has on today’s situation, these effects can only be overcome by recommitting ourselves to the principle of colorblindness in law and policy. The moment for guttig the VRA is now.

I seek no laws or ordinances forbidding the wearing of pants by women. So why would I seek rules telling men they cannot wear skirts? People can wear whatever they want—if what they wear is not a disguise to evade detection in the commission of a crime. What I will not abide by are laws and policies telling me that I must believe or speak in ways that affirm lies. A free society cannot tolerate rules that punish people for telling the truth or refusing to tell falsehoods. If we lose this shared understanding, then freedom dies. 

In early 2025, in Washington State, Frances Staudt, a fifteen-year-old junior varsity basketball player, refused to play against an eighteen-year-old male athlete on an opposing girls’ team. The dispute occurred within the Tumwater School District, where athletic programs are governed by the Washington Interscholastic Activities Association (WIAA). Under WIAA policy, students may participate on sports teams consistent with their “gender identity,” regardless of their gender (or sex), without the need for legal or medical documentation. Not that legal or medical documentation should have any relevance, but I want readers to reflect on the fact that a male can merely say he is a female and play against girls in women’s sports. That’s all it takes: a male telling a lie about his gender. District administrators and the WIAA will valorize gender identity doctrine and discipline those who dissent from it.  

According to Staudt’s mother, she and her daughter were surprised to discover that a male player was competing on a girls’ junior varsity team (composed mostly of fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds). Concerned about fairness and safety, the mother approached the athletic director for clarification. She raised the matter of Trump’s executive order banning the practice of allowing males to compete against females in women’s sports. She was told that the district does not discriminate based on “gender identity” and that its policies were aligned with Washington State law, not federal directives. 

Staudt chose not to play in the game. As she left the court, she reportedly muttered, “You’re a man” toward the opposing athlete—an impulsive remark, she says, made in anger rather than ill will. But what does the intent of her remark matter? People don’t have the right to make expressions of ill will in Washington State? Her remark did not disrupt anything except perhaps the delusions of the male athlete. She said it once, so it couldn’t possibly stand as a case of harassment. She’s a teenage girl, the male is an adult, so intimidation is out of the question. Stating “You’re a man” to a man is not a true threat. It is simply an acknowledgment of the truth. 

Yet the moment sparked a disciplinary investigation, the district accusing Staudt of violating its “anti-bullying, harassment, and intimidation” policy by “misgendering” the transgender athlete. As I have explained on this platform, misgendering is when you, either accidentally or intentionally, call a person by the gender they are not. In this case, the girl acknowledged the gender of the male athlete; therefore, by definition, she did not misgender him. However, in the district’s view, which has adopted the rules of gender identity doctrine, the comment constituted harassment based on “gender identity,” a protected category under state law. I want readers to reflect on this: Washington State has made lying about one’s gender a protected category, while authorizing the thought police of a neoreligion to discipline those who tell the truth.

When I say truth, I am not offering an opinion but observing a trio of straightforward scientific facts, among the most fundamental truths of mammalian biology: gender is objective, binary, and immutable. Gender is not a subjective matter that becomes reality because public authorities claim it as such. Gender is not spoken into existence. Gender describes reproductive anatomy, which exists independently of language. It is either one or the other—even if the outward appearance of the individual is deceptive. One either acknowledges it or deceives oneself or others about it. 

The Staudt family rightly and strenuously objected to the situation, arguing that Frances was being punished for expressing discomfort with a situation she—and anybody else with a just and rational mind—perceived as unfair and unsafe. They claimed that her speech—however blunt—was constitutionally protected and that the school’s action violated her rights under Title IX and the First Amendment. 

How could the school not have violated her rights? Title IX is a 1972 federal law prohibiting sex-based discrimination in any educational activity or program receiving federal funding. It protects staff and students from discrimination based on sex, guaranteeing equal opportunity in academics and athletics. Moreover, the First Amendment ensures that no public institution or program can make law or policy restricting freedom of conscience or expression except where speech acts are used to disrupt the free speech rights of others, represent an imminent threat of violence, or defame another (a civil matter requiring the defendant to have made demonstrably false statements about a plaintiff with the intent to harm his reputation).

Trump’s Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (DoE/OCR) subsequently opened a Title IX investigation into the Tumwater School District. The federal inquiry seeks to determine whether the district’s handling of the case discriminated against Staudt based on sex or expression. At issue is whether the school’s actions reflect compelled ideological conformity—that is, students being forced to affirm beliefs about gender that conflict with biological and moral convictions. That this happened is obvious, and I applaud the DoE/OCR for moving aggressively on this case.  

Those who support the inclusion of males in female sports maintain that protecting “transgender students” from verbal harassment is an essential application of civil rights law. But there is nothing in civil rights law warranting such a claim. I ask for the reader’s patience while I get into the weeds on this. Not only does it help with understanding the case, but it also demonstrates how elections matter to preserving the Republic and its core principles. 

Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 was enacted to ensure equal opportunities for girls and women, particularly in athletics. Its framers understood sex as biological (what else would it be?). Yet in recent years, federal authorities have broadened Title IX’s interpretation to include “gender identity,” Bob Stoller’s (unfalsifiable) notion that one’s internal sense of gender is incongruent with their gender observed at birth, effectively redefining who qualifies as “female” in athletic competition. Washington State’s own civil rights laws go further still, explicitly prohibiting “discrimination” based on “gender identity” (or “gender expression”).  

How did politicians in Washington State come to believe they are permitted to violate Title IX? It was a sleight of hand by the Democrats. In June 2021, Biden’s DoE announced that it would enforce Title IX’s protections against sex discrimination to cover discrimination based on “gender identity” and sexual orientation, relying on the Supreme Court’s 2020 decision in Bostock v Clayton County, which interpreted “sex” in the context of employment law under Title VII, which I will explain in a moment. In April 2024, the DoE issued updated Title IX regulations reaffirming that position, stating explicitly that discrimination based on “gender identity” constitutes “sex discrimination.”

Bostock v Clayton County involved Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits employment discrimination based on sex. In a 6-3 decision, penned by Justice Neil Gorsuch, the Court consolidated three cases in which, upon learning that employees were gay or transgender, employers terminated their employment. The reasoning of the majority was that discrimination based on sexual orientation or “gender identity” necessarily involves treating someone differently because of their sex. 

On the matter of sexual orientation, the decision makes sense. For example, if an employer fires a man for being attracted to men, but wouldn’t fire a woman for being attracted to men, sex is a but-for cause of the decision. However, the “gender identity” piece does not follow. The Court argued that firing someone for being “transgender” means penalizing them for their gender identity not matching the sex assigned at birth, thus constituting a form of “sex-based discrimination.” This assumes as valid gender identity doctrine while dismissing out of hand the reasons why an employer might have cause to believe that a man pretending to be a woman creates an unsafe working environment for customers and other employees. An employer dismissing a man pretending to be a woman is not discriminating on the basis of gender, but on the basis of the man’s deceit or delusion. If he is to be protected from termination for identifying as a woman, then the Court needs to leverage other law and precedent, not Title VII. (I leave it up to the reader to consider how the Court can accomplish this.) 

While Bostock directly interpreted Title VII (employment law), however fallaciously, Title IX (education law) uses similar wording, since it bans discrimination “on the basis of sex” in federally funded education programs. Federal agencies under Biden leveraged this superficial similarity to extend protections under Title IX to “gender identity” in schools, including athletics, disciplinary matters, and restrooms. In a blatant disregard of reason and statute, they forced through an education policy that harms and discriminates against girls and women. 

Stretching Bostock’s logic from Title VII to Title IX is not a bridge too far; it contradicts the principle of sex segregation in sports and other areas of public life as dictated by Title IX. Title IX, though it bans discrimination on the basis of sex, differs fundamentally in context, history, and structure from Title VII. Bostock’s reasoning, derived in the employment context, does not logically carry over to educational settings or to unique programs therein—athletics, privacy, or sex-separation issues. Indeed, Title IX expressly contemplates single-sex educational programs and athletics—it presumes sex segregation in sports and empowers authorities to maintain separate sports for females and males—in ways that Title VII does not. The presence of special carveouts or permissive provisions for differential treatment or separation based on sex is evidence that Congress intended distinctions by sex. That’s the point of Title IX!

In light of the Supreme Court’s ruling in June 2024 in the case of Loper Bright Enterprises v Raimondo, which overturned the long-standing Chevron deference doctrine, Title IX’s implementing regulations crafted by Biden’s DoE/OCR, relying on Bostock as a basis for interpreting Title IX, involves an impermissible agency overreach, especially when the ruling holds that courts should not give deference to interpretations that go beyond the statutory language. After all, Title IX is hardly an ambiguous statute. Moreover, the decision in Bostock is expressly confined to Title VII and employment decisions; it does not address educational institutions, athletics, bathrooms, locker rooms, privacy rights, etc. Applying Bostock to Title IX is an analogical leap lacking any grounding in precedent or statutory language. Extending Bostock to Title IX thus upends longstanding practices around sex-separated facilities, rules, and teams in educational activities and institutions, thus conflicting with other regulatory, statutory, and constitutional principles—e.g., bodily privacy and equal protection.

It’s not as if the Supreme Court has not addressed this issue in the meantime. In Department of Education v Louisiana(2024), the Court declined to allow enforcement of the Biden Administration’s new Title IX rule, which included expanded definitions of sex, leaving in place injunctions against those provisions. The Court’s stay implicitly recognizes that lower courts have reasonably found merit in claims against the rule’s “gender identity” provisions. So, mustering as much charity as possible in this case, appealing to Bostock as a persuasive authority on Title IX matters at the very best jumps the gun. (Do we have any doubt in how the Court will rule if the substance of this or similar cases comes before them?)

Thus, we have in the Washington State case a collision between state enforcement of “transgender inclusion” and federal efforts to preserve sex-based distinctions, especially in light of Trump’s executive order. When the athletic director told Frances’s mother that the district would follow state law, not federal directives, he was pitting the Democrats’ notion of state rights against federal supremacy in the governance of civil rights. Washington State is well out of its lane on this one. States cannot be allowed to dissent from federal statute or resist federal authority.

The First Amendment adds another layer. What are Staudt’s rights in light of the free speech rules of the Republic? Under the Supreme Court’s 1969 ruling in Tinker v Des Moines, students retain their right to free expression in school so long as their speech does not materially disrupt the educational environment or amount to a true threat. Whether Staudt’s comment constitutes harassment is the central question. As I already suggested, since she simply voiced a biological truth, the accusation that she targeted another student’s identity in a way that could reasonably cause harm is absurd on its face. If people are disciplined for expressing true statements because they hurt feelings, then conditions of unfreedom are obtained by coercive state power, illegitimately wielding that power. 

This case is important because its ultimate resolution will carry national implications. If the OCR determines that the Tumwater district violated Staudt’s rights, it could set a precedent affirming sex-based protections under Title IX and limit the ability of schools across the nation to discipline students for gender-related speech. If the district is upheld, it will reinforce the authority of schools to enforce an Orwellian regime of “respectful language” policies and expand the scope of compelled affirmation of “gender identity” in public education. This would effectively render the First Amendment inert in the face of gender identity doctrine. 

At the heart of the Staudt case lies a profound moral and social question: whether laws originally designed to protect girls and women are being reinterpreted in ways that redefine womanhood itself, over against the fundamental truths I earlier identified and at great detriment to girls and women. The debate is not simply about one student’s comment, but about the meaning of fairness and freedom in a pluralistic society. Frances Staudt’s experience illustrates how individual conscience and institutional policy are in direct conflict in the modern establishment of education and progressive ideology, determined by elite command of the educational system.

Thus, in the end, the Frances Staudt case represents more than a local dispute. It’s a microcosm of the broader struggle over equality, the protection of females, the protection of speech, and the attempt to infect biology with the ideology of queer politics. I have already made my views known on these matters, so I will briefly summarize them in concluding this essay:

True equality requires recognizing natural group differences, in this case, the inherent difference between females and males. Treating males as if they are females systematically disadvantages females and puts them in harm’s way.

Free speech, if it means anything, is the freedom to express opinions that hurt other people’s feelings. With obvious exceptions, we each have a right to be protected from harmful action, but do not enjoy a right to be protected from expressions of truth.

Finally, science must always trump ideology in the realm of law and policy—and in science itself. If it ever comes to pass that crackpot notions like “gender identity” stand as truth in education, law, and policy, we will live in a society determined by lies. 

The state board and Tumwater Board have also pushed back. The Tumwater Board adopted a resolution backing a change to WIAA policy that would limit participation in girls’ sports to students whose biological sex is female. The Education Department is threatening to withhold federal money if Washington state continues to allow trans athletes on girls’ and women’s teams. Meanwhile, a federal judge has issued a temporary ruling that blocks this strategy — saying the Trump administration’s actions amount to executive overreach.

With regard to gender identity, the Trump Administration through DOE has largely rescinded or reversed the Biden-era interpretations under Title IX. It has reverted to enforcing the 2020 Title IX rule, which does not treat gender identity as a protected category, and the Biden 2024 rule that explicitly expanded Title IX protections to include gender identity has been struck down by a federal court and is no longer enforceable.

Why is Washington State being so recalcitrant? Washington State Superintendent of Public Instruction Chris Reykdal tells us why: “They want to take folks to court. They want high-profile cases. They’re not just trying to win a case—they’re trying to vilify trans youth and the schools that support them. What they’re really doing is taking on states’ rights.”

There it is. Just as with immigration and crime, progressive Democrats see gender identity doctrine as a battle in the civil war they are fomenting. This is the neoconfederate tendency that began as soon as the Confederacy was defeated by Union forces way back in the 1860s. Progressives are hiding their secessionist desires behind the false charge that conservatives are waging a cultural war against progressives.

Again, Reykdal: “The best thing to do is follow state law. And the best thing for the federal government to do is deal with the numerous problems they have right now, instead of crafting a cultural war against, arguably, five to ten kids on average per state.” One boy in girls’ sports is enough. It’s not about numbers. It’s about principle. It’s about civil rights.

The latest trend on social media is to declare, “I am Antifa.”

I reject authoritarianism in all its forms, whether it comes from the left or the right. Why would anyone not afflicted by an authoritarian impulse pledge allegiance to an irrational, militant, paramilitary movement? Such behavior reflects the psychopathology of a corporate state-managed society.

As Michael Parenti once observed about the rational use of irrationalism, those who wield power often mobilize irrational popular forces to weaken the modern nation-state that constrains their global ambitions. Parenti himself was a partisan who failed to see this tendency on the left. Even my hero George Orwell fell into this trap earlier in his life (which Antifa clowns on X take great pains to tell me—as if I didn’t know).

If one truly wishes to oppose corporate-state domination, why side with emotionally volatile extremists? People really can’t see Antifa today prancing about in animal costumes as the emotionally dysregulated misfits that they are? Why not instead join with humanity and reason—championing democratic-republicanism and the classical liberal values that made the West the freest and most advanced and prosperous civilization in history?

Why such hostility toward the Enlightenment? Have those who declare themselves Antifa allies ever examined their motives? Have they taken any time to study the social psychology of the movement with which they align themselves?

What they would find if they did is that their worldview fallaciously treats the principles of democratic-republicanism and classical liberalism—freedom of conscience, speech, and press; the right to peaceful assembly; individualism; privacy—as mere ideological constructs of Western imperialism, devised to justify political-economic domination and cultural hegemony.

Viewed through the warp of postmodernist ideology, such values obscure systems of exploitation by portraying Western norms as the only legitimate form of governance, thereby discrediting non-Western political traditions and social arrangements—as if universal rights were not subject to objective, scientific inquiry.

It’s indeed curious that many who claim to follow Karl Marx—who believed in science and a universal species-being—now insist that these “universal” rights serve only to perpetuate Western influence and suppress indigenous autonomy, thus valorizing backward and primitive belief systems.

For those who don’t know, Marx’s concept of species-being (Gattungswesen) refers to humanity’s essential nature as a conscious, creative, and social species capable of shaping the world through purposeful labor.

In his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Marx argued that humans realize this essence through productive activity expressing both individual and collective potential—a premise he sought to (and did) establish scientifically, and from which Maslow’s hierarchy of needs later follows.

Of course, Marx was a critic of imperialism, but he did not reject the Enlightenment. He believed that the elements of false universality projected by bourgeois ideology needed to be overcome by realizing the Enlightenment’s rational, universal human ideals in practice, not by discarding them. Marx was a child of the Enlightenment, not an opponent of it. Today’s antifascist is a postmodernist.

Remember, Marx was, in his foundations, a republican and a child of the liberal Enlightenment, even though he went beyond both in his vision of a future society without designing that society, since it would be built by the people democratically. His political formation was in the context of a movement steeped in republican humanism, civil liberty, and rational critique of monarchy and clerical authority. Marx was a journalist and democratic reformer, demanding freedom of the press, constitutional government, and civic participation—all classic liberal and republican ideals. He wrote a letter praising Lincoln for his efforts to save the American Republic from the racist and transnational aspirations of the Democratic Party.

Yet from the standpoint of contemporary “antifascism,” resisting or dismantling these principles and values—even by coercive means—is recast as an act of “decolonization” and “self-determination” against an allegedly oppressive, imperial order, appropriating Marx’s righteous opposition to the exploitation of man by man to upend the Enlightenment.

The corruption that has estranged humanity from its species-being will not be overcome by rejecting the Enlightenment or individualism. It will be overcome by embracing reason and working peacefully to build a world that meets the needs of all—without sacrificing human essence on the altar of primitive and quasireligious ideology.

Antifa has it backward. Those who embrace antifascism as currently conceived (since, of course, any reasonable person is antifascist) are not defending rational individualism but succumbing to a form of nihilism—a political and moral pathology masquerading as liberation.

This is why Antifa draws like flies emotionally dysregulated misfits, who are used by corporate elites as weapons in the disordering of the West. To what end? A transnational system in which humanity will be managed on high-tech estates to preserve the power and wealth of a global oligarchy.

The false consciousness is profound on today’s left. They don’t know what they’re fighting for, and so they fight against their own material interests. We see the same thing in the Islamic world. Hence, the affinity between the so-called antifascist and the openly declared real-world clerical authoritarians in Muslim-majority countries (hence the peril of Islamization of the West).

This is why the greatest postmodernist of them all, Michel Foucault—the Father of Queer Theory—was sympathetic to Islamism. He saw in the Iranian Revolution of 1978–79 a “political spirituality”—a collective uprising that rejected both Western liberalism and Marxist materialism.

Foucault was enchanted by the way Islamists mobilized religious belief as a form of resistance to “Western-imposed modernity” and the Shah’s “technocratic regime.” Foucault viewed revolution as an alternative to Western political rationality—a rebellion against what he saw as the “disciplinary power of modernity.” Foucault’s texts are seductive. They are fraught with danger.

This is the world Antifa wants for us. Rather than oppose the corporate-state technocratic organization sought by today’s social democrats, to detangle corporate power from republican governance and restore the Enlightenment, and continue with the final liberation of mankind from unreason, they condemn the Enlightenment altogether and seek the destruction of the nation-state. This is why the Democratic Party is dissimulating the terrorism Antifa represents. The Party also seeks a transnational world.

As for Marx, yes, he wanted a world without nation-states. Here, he was naive. However naive he was about this, he did not want a stateless world ruled by corporate actors. He wanted a stateless world with rational democratic processes as its foundation. There’s no path to that world through so-called antifascism. There is only madness and unfreedom to be found there. And those irrationalisms begin as soon as we start our walk down that path.

If you see the officer as doing something wrong in the video below, you may have absorbed a politically selective, anti-government ideology. If instead you ask why the woman is refusing to obey lawful commands, then you are asking the right question. Public safety depends on mutual responsibility—officers must act within the law, and civilians must comply with lawful orders.

Full story here https://t.co/Q4TmWsmyGa

— #SeekingTheTruth JoshWho (@JoshWhoX) October 11, 2025

A public service reminder: You do not have a right to resist a lawful arrest. If you believe an arrest is unlawful, the proper place to challenge it is in court, not in the moment. Civilians do not have the authority to unilaterally decide whether an arrest is legitimate. Were that the standard, resistance would become routine, and encounters between police and civilians would be even more dangerous. This is precisely why resisting arrest often results in additional charges such as obstruction, resisting, or even felony assault on an officer.

If you resist arrest, any injuries you sustain are self-inflicted consequences of that decision. Officers are authorized to use necessary and proportionate force to carry out an arrest—and to defend themselves if attacked. Violence begets violence in this case. When a suspect resists, an officer’s use of force is both lawful and, in many cases, unavoidable.

The deeper issue—amplified by modern antiracist doctrine—is the growing belief that police authority is inherently illegitimate or racially motivated (or both). This ideology teaches civilians that resistance to law enforcement is justified. It is a dangerous and destructive belief.

This mindset drives the public’s divided reactions to incidents like this. America increasingly splits along two lines: those who believe that public safety requires respect for law enforcement, and those who reject the legitimacy of both law enforcement and the rule of law itself. The first position supports the principles of a democratic republic; the second reflects an insurrectionist impulse that undermines civil order.

You see this same sentiment in opposition to ICE and other agencies carrying out lawful duties. The issue is not that progressives reject the use of state power altogether—they simply wish it directed only against their political adversaries. Hence the double standard: pro-police when the subject is a political opponent, anti-police when the subject is an ideological ally.

This hypocrisy is visible in the celebration of legal actions against Trump and his supporters, contrasted with outrage when similar accountability is applied to those on the left—whether for obstruction, false statements, or other federal offenses. The same selective outrage will surface again when the next high-profile indictment emerges.

Ultimately, it is not the existence of law enforcement that signals authoritarianism—but the selective politicization of it. When one side weaponizes justice and delegitimizes the rule of law itself, that is the hallmark of authoritarianism.

Historian Mark Bray, assistant teaching professor at Rutgers University, and the author of the partisan 2017 Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook, which The New Yorker describes as “a how-to for would-be activists,” has relocated from New Jersey to Spain after receiving multiple death threats, some of which were sent to his home.

Bray blames his decision on a campaign by the Rutgers chapter of Turning Point USA, which circulated a petition calling him “Dr. Antifa” and demanding his dismissal. Speaking with Newsweek, Bray described the harassment as part of a larger national pattern that he claims has intensified under the Trump administration—a trend, he believes, that reflects the country’s shift toward a more authoritarian political climate. And readers will see, Bray flips the authoritarian problematic on its head.

I disagree with Turning Point USA’s petition (I was myself the target of a petition by leftwing students who sought my dismissal for criticisms of gender identity doctrine). And, of course, I condemn death threats. I have written recently about the rise of domestic violence on the left, so I would hope my position on this is clear. But the irony of Bray’s concerns is rather delicious given that he himself is proudly authoritarian and promotes Antifa, a designated domestic terrorist organization, as a means of establishing a political climate in which those with whom Bray and his ilk disagree are harassed, intimidated, and even subject to violence.

In this exposé, I reveal the contradictions in Bray’s thought. I also examine the work of Canadian sociologist Stanislav Vysotsky, who, like Bray, albeit less openly sympathetic to antifascism as expressed by the politics and actions of Antifa, fails to condemn collective violence or the ideology that animates Antifa.

Bray is a duplicitous individual. He describes his book as “partisan history,” openly describing it as written “from the perspective of the anti-fascist movement.” Yet, Bray recently told the media something very different about the character of his scholarship. In a statement he made to the New York Times last Wednesday, he said, “My role in this is as a professor. I’ve never been part of an Antifa group, and I’m not currently.” He then added: “There’s an effort underway to paint me as someone who is doing the things that I’ve researched, but that couldn’t be further from the truth.”

What Bray is telling the NY Times could not be further from the truth. In fact, he announces in the introduction to The Anti-Fascist Handbook that “at the very least 50 percent of author proceeds will go to the International Anti-Fascist Defense Fund, which is administered by more than three hundred antifa from eighteen countries.” He is not only an intellectual partisan of Antifa, but helps fund them. Perhaps this is why he fled the country.

Bray’s Antifa rationalizes the authoritarianism of so-called “antifascism” by arguing, in typical fashion, that fascism must be confronted and dismantled before it gains political strength. For Bray, the liberal principle of open discourse and tolerance of dissent, which I advocate for on this platform and in the classroom, is naïve and even dangerous. This is because it allows fascist ideas to grow under the protection of free speech. His solution is militant antifascism—a willingness to disrupt, silence, and even physically “resist” those he and his ilk smear as “fascists.” This is not repression, he contends, but “preemptive self-defense.”

The contradiction in Bray’s argument should be obvious to a clear and objective mind: he “opposes” authoritarianism by adopting its fundamental premise: that a select moral vanguard should determine which ideas may or may not be expressed, and, furthermore, coercion to silence those whose ideas are deemed beyond the line of the freely expressible is warranted. While claiming to defend freedom, his framework licenses censorship and violence whenever they serve what he regards as the “greater good.” Such logic more than blurs the line between opposing tyranny and imitating it—it erases it. It becomes the thing itself.

Beneath the contradiction lies a deeper presumption common to social justice politics—one of epistemic certainty. Bray’s argument assumes that only he and those who share his ideology can correctly identify “fascism” and distinguish it from other forms of political expression. Bray thus is a self-appointed commissar in an authoritarian movement. It is based on this claim to absolute truth that Antifa finds its moral authority to harass, intimidate, and harm those they identify as “fascist”—actions that move beyond the rule of law. The ethic expressed here presumes that the rule of law in the context of a state is an illegitimate arrangement. This is anarchism.

What is fascism in Bray’s mind? Absurdly elastic, Bray’s definition of fascism encompasses a range of nationalist, right-wing, and traditionalist views. (He leans on Robert Paxton’s 2004 The Anatomy of Fascism for his definition, which famously proceeds without the economic, legal, or political analysis of fascism in the same systematic way that, for example, Franz Neumann does in his 1942 Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism.) Bray ostensibly differentiates between conservative or right-wing views and fascist movements, while at the same time acknowledging a blurry boundary in practice. In effect, he treats the views of tens of millions of ordinary Americans as nascent fascism, while, again, granting his movement the authority to decide what beliefs and expressions are legitimate—and to use violence against those Antifa deems illegitimate in theirs.

Bray’s antifascism is not a critique of a social phenomenon but grounded in an ideological vision of society—one that is rhetorically democratic and egalitarian, but, in reality, militantly opposed to both modern and traditional principles and values. From his standpoint, any defense of inherited norms, national identity, selected religious traditions, or traditional culture can be potentially described as a precursor to fascism. Thus, Bray’s anti-fascism doesn’t protect society from tyranny; it seeks to impose a conception of the “just society,” against which all dissent to a particular politics is condemned as dangerous and to be met with various forms of coercion—harassment, intimidation, and violence.

Liberal democracy and republicanism, by contrast, rest on epistemic humility: the recognition that no faction or individual can be trusted to decide who may speak or peaceably assemble or which thoughts can be expressed. Free expression is defended not because every idea is good, but because no authority can be safely empowered to decide which ideas are too dangerous to hear. By rejecting that principle, Bray’s militant antifascism undermines the very pluralism that distinguishes a free society from a repressive one. In this way, Bray’s work exhibits the same absolutism that has marked authoritarian movements throughout history.

This is the mark of the authoritarian threat to the West I have described on this platform for years. While Bray rightly warns of the dangers of genuine fascism, his solution replicates its structure of thought and action; thus, his warning hails from an illegitimate place. This is why I argue on Freedom and Reason that antifascism, as conceived by Antifa, is an element of the New Fascism, which is not an idea, but actions pursued on the streets of the West and in the halls of its governments. The tendency here is totalitarian monopoly capitalism. Antifa is its street-level expression. For true believers, anarchism is an ideology blind to its own consequences. For those who know better, the contradiction is a smokescreen.

Social media is awash in memes identifying those defending the West from fascism as “Antifa.” However, any real antifascist would condemn Antifa. Indeed, that’s how you know who a genuine antifascist is: whether they condemn or defend Antifa. Eisenhower and the Greatest Generation are not to be compared to the cluster B types and nihilistic misfits who make up Antifa. The comparison is an insult to their sacrifices.

President Donald Trump’s recent designation of Antifa as a domestic terrorist organization is the authentic expression of antifascist politics of today. Trump is nipping fascism in the bud by cracking down on Antifa and interrogating its organizational structure and funding sources. Antifa appeals to the First Amendment to defend their actions. But only peaceful protests are protected by the First Amendment—the finest articulation in the modern period of the principles Antifa tramples every time its members engage in coercion against citizens and government officials. How could anarchists believe in the First Amendment, anyway? They don’t believe in the government that recognizes and protects those rights!

Bray is not the only academic who is—if in this case tacitly—sympathetic to Antifa’s brand of militant antifascist action. In a 2020 book and a 2015 article published in an academic journal, sociologist Stanislav Vysotsky, an associate professor of criminology at the University of the Fraser Valley, argues that militant antifascism functions as a form of community self-defense rather than as a form of chaos or criminality. His central contention is that militant anti-fascists engage in what he calls “prefigurative politics,” meaning they enact the kind of society they wish to see—one without oppressive hierarchies or state violence—through collective and direct action.

In “The Anarchy Police: Militant Anti-Fascism as Alternative Policing Practice,” published in Critical Criminology in 2015 (you can find the full text here), which precedes Bray’s handbook, Vysotsky examines how antifascists fill the vacuum left by state inaction or complicity in confronting far-right organizing. In this space, he contends, militant antifascists act as a grassroots, non-state policing force. Unlike formal police institutions that protect existing power structures, antifascist groups monitor, expose, and disrupt fascist and white supremacist organizing to safeguard their communities.

This view parallels the practice Southerners during Redemption described as “self-help,” that is, collective extralegal action associated with the lynching of those viewed as threatening what whites perceived as an inherent moral order. Vysotsky’s conclusion states as much, only the conception of the moral order is switched: “This article posits that there may be confrontational, even violent, forms of action that can be taken to ensure safety and order that are consistent with anarchist principles.” 

Such action, Vysotsky argues, challenges the monopoly on violence claimed by the state—a monopoly he fails to see or denies as necessary for the preservation of a democratic republic. Recall Max Weber’s definition of the state as an entity that claims a monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory. While many actors, such as individuals, groups, or organizations, might use force, only the state is recognized as having the right to do so. For Weber, this monopoly is what fundamentally distinguishes the state from other forms of social organization.

In the United States, the right of individuals to use force in self-defense under certain conditions is recognized. However, as the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution make clear, the federal government is the vehicle through which collective self-defense is manifest. Without this arrangement, any action dressing itself in the ethic of collective self-defense represents an expression of mob rule. This is precisely why the United States was established as a constitutional republic (see Our Constitution and the Federal Authority to Quell Rebellion).

Legal systems, the military, and the police all operate under this authority (i.e., legitimate power), enforcing laws and ensuring order (see Concerning the Powers of the US Constitution—And Those Defying Them; also Posse Comitatus and the Ghosts of Redemption). Without this recognized monopoly, the state’s authority would fragment, leading to chaos with competing sources of power. Thus, Weber’s definition links political legitimacy directly to the state’s exclusive right to authorize and wield force. It is this political legitimacy that current-day antifascism seeks to undermine so that, via disorder, the social order can be reordered not through democratic processes but by the force of the mob. This is why the police and other law enforcement are among the targets of Antifa action, which we are seeing playing out on the streets of America as I write this essay.

In American Antifa: The Tactics, Culture, and Practice of Militant Antifascism, published in 2020 (here Vysotsky cites Bray’s work), Vysotsky situates Antifa within a broader political culture of anarchism, emphasizing that militant tactics—such as confrontation, disruption, and doxxing—are rooted in a defensive posture against fascists and racist threats. Vysotsky argues that these groups operate through decentralized networks, emphasizing collective action. He insists that militant antifascism is reactive rather than inherently violent—it emerges in response to what he supposes are real threats from fascist movements and the failure of state institutions to protect marginalized communities.

Vysotsky’s framing is clever, but its intent is obvious. If the government moves to suppress Antifa violence, then Antifa and its allies accuse the government of the very behavior it claims to be defending its communities from. This functions as a form of preemptive justification, where accusations of oppression are used to reframe violence as morally necessary, and any attempt to curb it as further proof of the original threat. Putting the matter as he does, Vysotsky flips the aggressor–victim dynamic, a rhetorical move that reframes defensive action as aggression, thereby justifying the very actions that provoked it—in this case, the duty of the state to secure domestic order and protect civilians and property. At its core, then, the rhetoric constitutes a form of moral reversal, in which those defending themselves from terrorism are portrayed as the true aggressors (we see this in the rhetoric of Hamas and other Islamic terrorist groups). When the government moves to suppress Antifa violence, Antifa and its allies—including Democrats and the mainstream media—claim that the state is enacting the very oppression Antifa is resisting.

Thus, in his writings, albeit in sideways fashion, Vysotsky valorizes militant anti-fascism as a legitimate, community-based response to the dangers of fascism, which is evidenced by the appearance or threat of legitimate collective defense, portrayed by anarchists as “state violence,” and, moreover, as an experiment in establishing non-state forms of justice and safety—that is, policing actions that usurp state authority. His analysis reframes Antifa not as the extremists they are, but as a form of ethical resistance that reflects broader anarchist commitments, foremost among them the rejection of allegedly oppressive power structures, i.e., the necessary functions of democratic government.

Even while speaking in organizational terms, Vysotsky obscures the fact of organization by arguing that what makes something “antifascist” isn’t belonging to an organization but participating in a shared political (sub)culture and repertoire of the tactics we see on the streets. Antifa, in his view, is not an organization but a “network of affinity groups.” Vysotsky could argue that apparent support for Antifa in his writings is defensible because, as an ethnographer, he is attempting a second-order account of the emic perspective of the (sub)culture under study. But it is often the case that advocacy wears the fig leaf of neutrality to disguise affinity.

It is noteworthy that Vysotsky claims that the depiction of Antifa as agents of chaos and criminality is a mainstream media construction. Yet we find mainstream reviews of Bray’s book not only praising his work but endorsing its purpose: After fawning over the book, the Los Angeles Review of Books states, “The book is at its best when criticizing the liberal view that official democratic institutions alone are sufficient to prevent a fascist seizure of power.” The Baltimore Beat writes that the “‘Antifa Handbook’ is hard history, a call to action, and an even-handed and reasonable explanation as to why we need to be way less damned reasonable.” The Progressive writes, “In the Trump era, Bray’s Handbook is essential reading.” This is a selection of reviews in the progressive-dominated media amplifying Bray’s advocacy for violent street-level violence against those Antifa designates as “fascists.” As noted, Vysotsky read Bray’s book and, presumably, was aware of the positive reviews of it as he was writing a book that can be reasonably seen as a tacit defense of Antifa.

Vysotsky is more openly sympathetic to Antifa in a 2017 article published by In These Times, “Towards a Broad Left Front Against Fascism,” in which he argues for unifying against the “far-right” rather than smearing those taking antifascist action. He emphasizes the importance of collective resistance to a dangerous force, strongly suggesting a stance supportive of antifascist efforts. Indeed, he criticizes liberals, e.g., Peter Beinart, who make many of the “same critiques of antifascist tactics that have become commonplace among the Right.”

These critiques, Vysotsky argues, effectively represent “apologism for white supremacy.” Thus, he has presumed a leftwing mythology about the West, that the belief and defense of a national community is a racist expression. He admits that Beinart’s critique of Antifa “rests on an assertion that the movement challenges the state’s monopoly on power, a claim that antifa are unlikely to argue with.” He then, fallaciously, writes, “At a time when the legitimacy of the state’s use of violence is under critique from the Left, it rings hollow to criticize activists for challenging this monopoly on force.” Criticism of the legitimacy of various state actions is not the same as challenging the state’s monopoly on the use of force. The former is necessary in a democracy. The latter, in action, constitutes insurrection. At any rate, Vysotsky is endorsing the Antifa position.

Keith Ellison, Today: Nobody even knows what Antifa is.

Keith Ellison, 2018: Tweets photo of himself holding Antifa handbook. pic.twitter.com/LJfZgsSNiz

— Western Lensman (@WesternLensman) October 11, 2025

Readers might find Bray and Vysotsky to be marginal figures in the political landscape. But as we have seen, Democrats and talking heads in the mainstream media defend Antifa, too, mostly by either insisting that Antifa is not an organization or that it doesn’t exist at all! At least these two academics recognize the reality of Antifa, even if they deny that it is a terrorist organization.

"Antifa is an idea, not an organization."

– Joe Biden https://t.co/wAfyclIFhF pic.twitter.com/VYSuiyIcnO

— Western Lensman (@WesternLensman) July 10, 2025

For the record, Antifaschistische Aktion (Antifa) was founded in 1932 in Germany. It was initiated by and under the command of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). The KPD had an official paramilitary arm, the Roter Frontkämpferbund (RFB), paralleling to the Nazi Sturmabteilung (SA). The RFB was banned in 1929 by the Weimar government because it was a violent, revolutionary, paramilitary organization that threatened public order and the democratic system. Of course it did not go away. The KPD continued to organize violent street action through its front group Antifa. While there is no analogy to the SA in today’s America, Antifa is alive and well and supported by today’s Democratic Party. And while there may be a smattering of communists in Antifa, it is, for the most part, composed of nihilists of the anarchist persuasion—hell bent on disrupting liberal freedoms and democratic institutions and processes.

Talking meat puppets spewing the same talking point word for word. pic.twitter.com/6vKn8eLIub

— James Woods (@RealJamesWoods) October 11, 2025

I want to close with what I said in last Thursday’s essay: Would you know fascism if you saw it? In these passages, I describe Mussolini’s Blackshirts and Hitler’s Brownshirts. The parallels between these historical examples of street-level fascism and Antifa are unmistakable:

Before and during their rise to power, Mussolini’s Blackshirts and Hitler’s Brownshirts disrupted public meetings and universities to silence dissent. They would enter classrooms, lecture halls, and political assemblies to shout down speakers, intimidate professors, and break up events organized by liberals and other perceived enemies of their movements. These actions were part of a broader strategy to suppress free speech, enforce ideological conformity, and create a culture of fear that paved the way for fascist control of intellectual and public life.

The Blackshirts waged open street warfare against the public, burning buildings, beating political opponents, and even killing activists and political figures. Their violence was tolerated—even quietly supported—by sympathetic businessmen and officials. Likewise, the Brownshirts engaged in street battles with civilians and law enforcement, using intimidation and violence to destabilize the public order. They assaulted citizens and political opponents. Their violence included murders of activists and political officials. Again, their violence was tolerated, even tacitly supported by businesses and government officials.

Does this sound familiar? Antifa is “just an idea,” you say? Nothing to see here? The federal government should do nothing about this? Maybe expose the sympathetic elites who tolerate and tacitly support them? Maybe expose those who tell you that Antifa is “just an idea”? Do you have a timepiece handy? Can you tell what time it is? Would you know fascism if you saw it?

Before and during their rise to power, Mussolini’s Blackshirts and Hitler’s Brownshirts disrupted public meetings and universities to silence dissent. They would enter classrooms, lecture halls, and political assemblies to shout down speakers, intimidate professors, and break up events organized by liberals and other perceived enemies of their movements. These actions were part of a broader strategy to suppress free speech, enforce ideological conformity, and create a culture of fear that paved the way for fascist control of intellectual and public life.

The Blackshirts waged open street warfare against the public, burning buildings, beating political opponents, and even killing activists and political figures. Their violence was tolerated—even quietly supported—by sympathetic businessmen and officials. Likewise, the Brownshirts engaged in street battles with civilians and law enforcement using intimidation and violence to destabilize the public order. They assaulted citizens and political opponents. Their violence included murders of activists and political officials. Again, their violence was tolerated, even tacitly supported by businesses and government officials.

Does this sound familiar? Antifa is “just an idea,” you say? Nothing to see here? The federal government should do nothing about this? Maybe expose the sympathetic elites who tolerate and tacitly support them? Maybe expose those who tell you that Antifa is “just an idea”? Do you have a timepiece handy? Can you tell what time it is? Would you know fascism if you saw it?

“The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened) against domestic Violence.” —Article IV, Section 4 of the United States Constitution.

“The Citizens of each State shall be entitled to all Privileges and Immunities of Citizens in the several States.” —Article IV, Section 1 of the United States Constitution.

Yesterday I published an essay (When Thinking Becomes Unthinkable: Motivated Reasoning and the Memory Hole) in which I reflected on something I had said earlier in the day on social media. I had just heard a reporter say that never in American history has a Republican President sent troops to a Democratic city. This reporter said it with so much confidence. Fascinating, I thought, how historical memory can be so easily erased among those who are supposed to be knowledgeable about American history. After all, they’re commenting on American history from a big platform, so one would think they would have some knowledge about what they’re talking about.

As I explained in that essay, not only has a Republican President sent troops to a Democratic city before, but Republican presidents have sent troops to Democratic cities on numerous occasions throughout the history of the nation. So have Democrats. In this essay, I follow up on yesterday’s essay to expand on the facts of this history. This is essay is one of several essays in which I argue that President Trump’s deployment of federal troops to cities across the nation is Constitutionally authorized and, moreover, an obligation, under certain conditions, as asserted in Article IV of the US Constitution, Sections 1 and 4, which I quoted at the top of this essay. (See Our Constitution and the Federal Authority to Quell Rebellion; Concerning the Powers of the US Constitution—And Those Defying Them; Posse Comitatus and the Ghosts of Redemption.)

When Illinois Governor JB Pritzker says (quoted in this New York Times article), “We must now start calling this what it is: Trump’s invasion,” he is using more than highly charged political language. The phrase frames former President Donald Trump not as a political opponent or policy actor, but as an aggressor against the nation itself. However, Trump is the duly elected President of the United States. He is sworn to faithfully execute the Office of President, and to the best of his ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States. His military commanders take an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic. Calling something an “invasion” implies a hostile, external force—an enemy rather than a domestic participant in legitimate governance. This means Pritzker is assuming the doctrine states’ rights in the same way the Southern states that formed the Confederacy assumed states’ rights in rebellion against the Union.

The public must see that this rhetoric echoes older and destructive actions and patterns in American history. During the Civil War, Confederate leaders routinely described actions by President Lincoln and the Union Army as an “invasion” of the South. They used that word to suggest that the federal government had become an occupying force, violating the sovereignty of the states. In doing so, they cast themselves as defenders of their homeland rather than what they were: rebels against the United States.

By referring to Trump’s actions as an “invasion,” Pritzker is mirroring that same rhetorical structure—depicting a national leader as a violator of the country he was elected to serve—of the Confederate rebel. It’s a reversal of legitimacy, a linguistic move that portrays the federal executive not as the protector of the nation but as an internal enemy. This is not accidental. It represents the neoconfederate politics of governors like Pritzker and Newsom. This is ANTI-American.

Pritzker’s choice of language reflects a broader trend in contemporary American politics, where Republicans are framed not as rivals within a shared system but as existential threats to it. The reality is that neoconfederacy is an existential threat to the Republic. More than rhetoric, segments of the judiciary are manifesting neoconfederate rhetoric in action.

Bottom line: Pritzker’s words carry more than a historical echo of Confederate rhetoric. The Democrats are neoconfederates, transforming political conflict into a struggle over the very identity and survival of the nation.

The US Constitution is the Supreme Law of the Republic. States are subordinate to the federal government. The federal government under the authority and obligation provided to it by Article I, Section 8, and Article IV, must deploy military troops to suppress insurrection and rebellion. This is why the Articles of Confederation were scrapped and replaced by the US Constitution. The US Constitution created a powerful executive to carry out the nation’s laws and secure domestic peace and tranquility.

You may be hearing a lot about the Redemptionist law Posse Comitatus Act, passed by Democrats in 1878 at the end of Reconstruction to thwart federal troops in their work to protect recently freed slaves. This law generally prohibits the use of the US military (Army and Air Force) to enforce domestic laws within the United States, UNLESS expressly authorized by the Constitution (see Article I, Section 8, and Article IV) and statutory law.

Statutory law on the matter is found in the 1807 Insurrection Act (10 USC. §§ 251–255). This Act is an exception to the Posse Comitatus Act. It authorizes the President to deploy federal troops within the US to suppress civil disorder, domestic violence, insurrection, rebellion, unlawful combinations, or conspiracies that hinder the enforcement of federal law or deprive citizens of their constitutional rights, particularly when state authorities are unable or unwilling to maintain order.

Additional statutory provisions permit military involvement in maintaining peace and order under specific circumstances. Among these is 10 USC §§ 271–284, the military may provide support to civilian law enforcement agencies, including assistance in counterdrug, counterterrorism, and border security operations, as well as technical, logistical, and intelligence support, though not direct law enforcement activities. Collectively, these statutes form the legal framework under which the President may deploy military forces domestically to preserve public order, enforce federal authority, or protect life and property when civilian agencies and state governments are unable to maintain control.

This is how 1957 (Little Rock, Arkansas, when President Eisenhower invoked the Insurrection Act to enforce desegregation orders, sending in federal troops) and 1992 (Los Angeles riots, when President George Bush Senior invoked it to restore order after the Rodney King verdict) were possible.

Even Democrats have used the military in this fashion. In 1962, President John F. Kennedy intervened in the integration of James Meredith at the Ole Miss. The state of Mississippi, led by Governor Ross Barnett, resisted the federal court order requiring Meredith’s admission. President Kennedy and his brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, deployed US Marshals and later federal troops to ensure Meredith could enroll. On September 30, 1962, violent riots erupted on campus, leaving two people dead and many injured as federal forces battled mobs opposing desegregation. Kennedy addressed the nation, urging respect for the rule of law and emphasizing that “observance of the law is the eternal safeguard of liberty.”

No rational people would establish a legal framework that allows for civil disorder, insurrection, rebellion, or states to fail or refuse to follow the federal law or protect federal buildings and installations. If you think Antifa is engaged in righteous action, you are entitled to that view. But you also have to recognize that a state adequate for guaranteeing peace and tranquility on the home front will enforce the nation’s laws.

When I was growing up, it was still possible to trust science as a check against falsehood. You could always say, “Let’s see what the science says,” and expect that facts would settle the matter, always understanding of course, that science is open and subject to change in light of evidence. The assumption was simple: science was a neutral and objective system of valid knowledge, relatively immune to the infection of ideology or the corruption of profit.

That confidence was grounded in a reasonable faith—if one may put it that way—in science as a self-correcting enterprise, something close to what sociologist Robert Merton of scientific norms as an internally consistent and self-regulating system.

Merton distinguished between “internal” and “external” views of science to explain different ways of understanding scientific activity. The internal view focuses on the cognitive and methodological aspects of science itself—theories, discoveries, and the logic of scientific inquiry—independent of social context. In contrast, the external view examines science as a social institution influenced by broader cultural, economic, and political factors—it looks at how societal norms and values shape scientific development and priorities. (For more on this, see Refining the Art and Science of Propaganda in the face of Popular Doubt and Questioning.)

Merton argues that a complete sociology of science integrates both perspectives, recognizing that scientific knowledge is both a logical, systematic pursuit of truth and a social product. I agree—indeed, it is in recognizing science as a social product that we can critique its corruption by power and profit. This contrasts with the postmodernist move of reducing knowledge to power. It is not that power plays no role in knowledge production (as Karl Marx told us in The German Ideology), but the claim that all knowledge reduces to power precludes the possibility of objective knowledge. It obscures the reality that power can corrupt knowledge, defined here as verified belief. Among other work it does, postmodernism is an obscurantist project.

Over time, confidence in science has eroded. The reason for this loss of trust is the recognition that science has been captured—not only by ideology, but by the machinery of corporate power and political fashion. Public skepticism is therefore warranted. The complaint that there are irrational forces in society delegitimizing science is corporate state propaganda designed to obscure the true source of delegitimization: the corruption of science in the age of corporate statism. When we are told today to “follow the science,” we are not being invited to consult a neutral body of knowledge, but an institution that speaks with the voice of a new priesthood.

The dogma of the new priesthood is scientism: an ideology that borrows the authority of science to sanctify its own prejudices and projects. When science contradicts known truths, members of the public come to doubt the claims scientists make. To clarify, I do not use scientism in this essay as an ideology that asserts science is the only valid source of knowledge; I do not dismiss other ways of knowing—the arts, philosophy, religion. I mean, in the present context, an ideology that elites represent as science.

The growing doubt expressed by the public is rational. Scientism is not science. It is a political theology wrapped in lab coats, claiming neutrality while advancing the orthodoxy of ideological and self-serving doctrine. Scientism inverts truth and falsehood: what was once a method for uncovering reality has become a mechanism for enforcing dogma. (See The Corporate Character of Scientism and embedded links.)

Take the phrase “sex assigned at birth.” Where did it come from, and what does it really mean? Before most people ever heard of gender identity theory, this phrase was already circulating in media, medicine, and education. It sounds harmless—even scientific—but it carries an entire ideology in its pocket. If you use it uncritically, you’re already accepting the doctrine it smuggles in.

The phrase as we use it today—particularly in gender studies, law, and activist contexts—is a late twentieth/early twenty-first century construct, building on earlier clinical uses. (For discussions on the propagandistic distinction between gender and sex, see Sex = Gender Redux: Eschewing the Queer Linguistic Bubble; Anti-Minotaur: Reclaiming The Truth of Gender From the Labyrinth of Lies;

According to a Columbia Law Review article by Jessica Clarke, “Sex Assigned at Birth,” the phrase has gained prominence in US legal and policy discussions concerning the rights of transgender individuals. Originally used by medical professionals to describe the designation of a newborn as male or female based on physical characteristics observed at birth, the term has evolved into a critical concept for understanding gender identity and discrimination.

The article notes that the phrase had been used, at least since the 1960s, to describe an obstetrician’s description of gender “based upon inspection of the external gen­italia.” We see the phase used as early as 1960, in Edgar Burns et al’s “Reassignment of Sex,” in the Journal of Urology. Here, we see the theory of gender identity is being smuggled in using the language of “reassignment,” which presumes sex is assigned in the first place, before Robert Stoller coined the term “gender identity.” (See my May 2024 essay Gender and the English Language.)

Clarke writes that this classification, recorded on birth certificates, is treated as a person’s legal sex. Over time, she records, advocates and scholars have embraced “sex assigned at birth” as a more accurate and less stigmatizing alternative to “biological sex,” emphasizing that it reflects an external categorization rather than an intrinsic identity. The term now plays a central role in legal definitions of transgender status and appears in both federal regulations and proposed legislation aimed at protecting LGBTQ individuals from discrimination in areas such as employment, health care, and housing.

Clarke argues that the rise of the term “biological sex” serves to give an appearance of scientific legitimacy to efforts aimed at discrediting transgender identities, and that its continued, uncritical use reinforces systems of exclusion. In contrast, the use of “sex assigned at birth” by transgender rights advocates highlights that sex is neither fixed nor strictly binary, and that gender identity itself is shaped by biological as well as social factors. (The real problem with the construct of “biological sex” is a redundancy that presumes there is some other kind of sex, and thus has those who insist on sex as intrinsic identity unwittingly doing the work of the gender identity movement.)

Of course, sex, or gender (same thing), is fixed and binary in mammals. Gender identity is an invention of crackpot psychiatry and sexology. In reality, sex is observed, not assigned. Doctors do not “assign” a baby’s sex any more than they assign its number of toes. They record what is there. They may be wrong, but that’s a matter of precision. To speak of “assignment” is to imply that sex is a bureaucratic label or social construct rather than a biological reality—that nature itself is subordinate to human decree, which is an act of oppressive power. This misrepresentation of reality is used to allow a man to change his sex on his birth certificate. The phrase and its institution in law, policy, and science turn an act of recognition into an act of creation. Gender thus becomes a product of psychosocial expectations, not of objective recording.

One might argue that the shift from describing “biological sex” as fixed toward a framing of “sex assigned at birth” helps foreground the complexity of sex (intersex variation, chromosomal diversity, etc.). But that is not how the phrase is used. It is used instead to advance gender identity doctrine. So-called intersex conditions and transgender identity are entirely different concepts, one rooted in errors in gene expression, the other in neoreligious dogma.

The same linguistic sleight of hand appears in the phrase “gender-affirming care.” It sounds kind, even compassionate, but in many cases it means the opposite: the chemical and surgical denial of the body’s sexed reality. To give hormones or surgery to help a boy live as a boy would be truly affirming. To remake his body to match a psychological fiction is to deny his gender in the name of affirming it. (See Gender Denying Care: A Medical and Moral Crisis.)

The inversion continues with the language of misgendering. If I call a man “ma’am” by mistake, I have misgendered him. But if I call a man “ma’am” because he identifies as a woman, I am told I have “correctly” gendered him. I am a good ally. Failure to be a good ally is met with an inversion of reality: I have “misgendered” the man. The demand is not for recognition of reality but for public participation in its denial. I am being conscripted into a social movement. Words become the instruments of forced assent.

As noted, the phrase “sex assigned at birth” now appears everywhere—from hospital paperwork to television scripts—rarely questioned and almost never defined, except to further sink the public mind into the doctrine of gender identity. Its power lies in its hegemonic acceptance. It enters our speech without fanfare and reshapes how we think without our noticing. Most people who use it are not trying to make a political statement; they are simply repeating what sounds like the respectable vocabulary of science. That is the genius of loaded language: it does its work below the level of consciousness. (See yesterday’s essay When Thinking Becomes Unthinkable: Motivated Reasoning and the Memory Hole.)

Loaded terms smuggle moral judgments into what appear to be neutral descriptions. We see this everywhere: “reproductive health” instead of “abortion,” “resistance” instead of “terrorism.” “Sex assigned at birth” functions in the same way. It contains a presupposition disguised as a fact—that sex is something humans decide rather than something nature declares. Once that premise is accepted, the entire argument of gender ideology follows automatically.

Language does not merely describe the world; it shapes it. When we adopt phrases like “sex assigned at birth” or “gender-affirming care” in referring to cross-sex hormones or mutilating surgeries, we are not just speaking—we are conceding. The argument about whether sex is biological or social has already been settled, quietly, by the wording of the sentence itself. This is how framing works. The phrase “sex assigned at birth” moves the discussion from the realm of observation to the realm of ideology. Once that frame is set, anyone who questions it appears irrational, bigoted, or even cruel. “Be kind,” those who still recognize reality are chastised. What’s being defended is no longer truth, but a way of seeing—a linguistic cage that defines the limits of permissible thought.

It’s the same mechanism George Orwell saw in the political language of his time. We still see it today in the euphemisms of modern warfare. “Collateral damage” means dead civilians. “Kinetic military action” means war. “Dead checking” means shooting the wounded to make sure they’re corpses. Such phrases don’t merely soften brutality; they erase it. They make murder sound like maintenance. When the language is murdered, conscience is murdered with it. (I wrote about this nearly twenty years ago in a May 2007 essay Sanitizing an Authoritarian Situation.) So it is with the new bureaucratic idioms of identity. “Sex assigned at birth” sounds sterile and scientific, but it performs the same moral anesthetic as “collateral damage.” It renders the natural artificial, the given negotiable, and the real optional.

The point is not just that bad language hides bad ideas. It’s that corrupted language is the symptom of a corrupted power. When rulers or institutions manipulate words, they are not trying to win an argument—they are trying to suppress debate and dissent. To change the meaning of words is to change the possibilities of thought. If you can dictate the vocabulary, you can dictate the imagination.

The battle over phrases like “sex assigned at birth” is thus not merely a quarrel about grammar; it is a struggle over who owns reality. As Orwell wrote in “Politics and the English Language,” political language is designed “to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable.” Today, the same impulse drives the redefinition of words that once had stable meanings. Power now seeks not only to control speech but to police thought. To resist this, one must recover the courage to name things as they are—to call truth by its rightful name, even when doing so is impolite. Even when doing so is unkind. Words matter because reality depends on them.

Philosopher Paul Diesing distinguishes between “technocratic” and “democratic” science as two contrasting models of how science relates to society and decision-making. Technocratic science is controlled by experts, government agencies, or corporations, emphasizing the use of specialized knowledge to solve problems from the top down from the standpoint of elite interests. Technocratic science limits public participation and treats scientific expertise as neutral and authoritative. In contrast, democratic science seeks to make scientific research more participatory and responsive to the needs and values of the wider community. It encourages transparency, public input, and collaboration between scientists and citizens. Diesing argued that democratic science promotes social responsibility and ethical reflection, while technocratic science risks serving only elite or institutional interests. We are in an era of technocratic science.

I rework every text in my head like the above meme. It’s obvious that we’re being subjected to a project of mass mind control. In this piece of the project, we’re being trained to habitually misgender others on command. As Orwell warned us, brainwashing occurs via language manipulation. How does one escape language manipulation? Since this form of manipulation depends on everybody not knowing that everybody else doesn’t believe men can be women, the goal of the free thinker is the state the truth whenever the falsehood appears in whatever form it takes. See my essays The Emperor is Naked: The Problems of Mutual Knowledge and Free Feelings and Wokism and the Naked Truth. Also see this interview clip with Steven Pinker.

Discussing common knowledge with Bill Maher.

Common knowledge is the topic of my new book: When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows…: Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life.https://t.co/ce5Tn87DF1 pic.twitter.com/tT8TvusghD

— Steven Pinker (@sapinker) September 6, 2025

“The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became the
truth.” —George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

Orwell, in Nineteen Eighty-Four, imagined “memory holes,” literal chutes used to destroy documents that contradicted the Party’s official narrative. Once an item was dropped into the memory hole, it was burned, and its existence denied—allowing the regime to maintain the illusion that it had always been right. Thus, “memory holing” refers to the deliberate alteration, erasure, and suppression of inconvenient events, facts, or records—so that they are effectively disappeared from public consciousness.

Earlier today, I wrote the following:

It is indeed a striking thing to watch someone speak with total confidence about a claim that is demonstrably false. The reporter (I was listening to the news in the background, so I don’t know which one) declared that “never before has a Republican president sent troops to a Democratic city.” The statement was delivered with such certainty as if it were a self-evident truth. Yet anyone with even a cursory knowledge of American history could recall counterexamples. In 1957, President Eisenhower—a Republican—sent federal troops to Little Rock, Arkansas, then a Democratic state, to enforce desegregation. More dramatically, Abraham Lincoln, another Republican President, sent troops into states governed by Democrats.

Even Democratic presidents have sent military troops into Democratic cities. In 1962, President Kennedy deployed the Guard and federal marshals to the University of Mississippi to enforce the enrollment of James Meredith, the university’s first black student. Meredith’s admission had been blocked by state officials. As violent riots erupted on campus in Oxford, Kennedy ordered federal troops and the Mississippi National Guard to restore order and ensure Meredith’s safety. This decisive action marked a critical moment in the Civil Rights Movement, demonstrating the federal government’s commitment to upholding court-ordered desegregation and the constitutional rights of all citizens.

The history of the federal government deploying military forces to ensure civil rights and impose order on disorder is neither obscure nor hidden. It is woven into the American story. It is, moreover, entirely permitted by the Constitution (see Our Constitution and the Federal Authority to Quell Rebellion; Concerning the Powers of the US Constitution—And Those Defying Them; Posse Comitatus and the Ghosts of Redemption). How could any of this be lost on any reasonably informed American? Whatever the reason, it is certainly helpful to Democrats making the case that President Trump is behaving in an unprecedented fashion for people to forget history. All the more important, then, to examine how this happens.

What is so striking about the inability to recall American history is not merely the factual error, but the psychological process behind it. Charitably, the reporter was not lying deliberately. Instead, she appeared to genuinely believe what she was saying. This kind of mental blind spot is an example of what psychologists call motivated reasoning—a cognitive bias in which people selectively recall, interpret, or even “forget” facts when those facts conflict with their ideological commitments or the narrative frameworks they have internalized. When a person’s worldview is strongly shaped by partisan or moral commitments, inconvenient historical facts can become inaccessible, not because they were never learned but because retrieving them threatens the coherence of the person’s narrative about reality.

There is also an element of cognitive dissonance here (see Living with Difficult Truths is Hard. How to Avoid the Error of Cognitive Dissonance). As Leon Festinger taught us, when information does not fit with our beliefs or expectations, our minds experience tension. One way to resolve that tension is to adjust our beliefs (ideal); another is to simply exclude the conflicting information from awareness. This can produce what looks like a stunning ignorance of the obvious. A person may literally “not see” what is right in front of them because their interpretive lens filters it out before it reaches conscious evaluation.

In public discourse, this phenomenon can be especially powerful because authority and platform reinforce the illusion of certainty. When someone on television speaks confidently, the audience may assume that the speaker’s memory and reasoning are sound. How could a newsreader not be an informed person? Yet confidence is not the same as accuracy. What we are witnessing in such moments is not merely an individual’s lapse but the collision of human cognition with ideology, resulting in blindness to the obvious—a blindness that can seem astonishing to those who are not under its spell.

Behind this psychological phenomenon lies something larger than individual bias, however: the workings of power itself. As Michael Parenti observed, the media’s primary function is not so much to tell us what to think as to tell us what to think about. This selective framing serves the interests of those who benefit from the existing order. Antonio Gramsci called the intellectuals who carry and reproduce the worldview of the ruling class “organic intellectuals”—figures like academics, journalists, newsreaders, and pundits who, often unconsciously, circulate elite perspectives as common sense. As Noam Chomsky observed, those performing this role have to be the most deeply indoctrinated.

This is the essence of hegemony: the subtle shaping of consciousness so that certain assumptions appear natural and others unthinkable. Within this ideological bubble, or epistemic enclosure, even the possibility of questioning dominant narratives is foreclosed. The result is not simply misinformation but a managed field of perception in which truth itself becomes subordinate to power.

This is a real problem. Millions of Americans get their information from talking heads who are themselves unable to see the disinformation they daily transmit to the masses. The result is a culture in which illusion passes for insight and repetition substitutes for truth. These figures are not so much deceivers as the deceived, reproducing elite ideology without recognizing it as such, their platforms amplifying the false narrative until it becomes the common sense of the nation. What emerges is not merely a misinformed public but a managed consciousness—one that mistakes propaganda. In such an environment, the boundaries of thought are policed not by censorship but by belief itself; what cannot be questioned cannot be changed, and what cannot be imagined cannot be questioned. The belief itself does the work of the censor.

In modern contexts, memory holing doesn’t require the physical destruction of documents or a totalitarian state. It happens through more subtle means: algorithmic invisibility, collective forgetfulness, or selective reporting produced by media cycles that move too fast for reflection. When a powerful institution or political party finds a narrative inconvenient, it can bury it—not necessarily censor it, but drown it in noise, ignore it, or reframe it until its original meaning is negated.

This phenomenon connects directly to ideas of hegemony and motivated reasoning discussed earlier in this essay. When those in power shape what is thinkable, they also shape what is remembered. The public’s memory becomes curated—structured by omission as much as by inclusion. In this way, memory holing is not just about forgetting the past; it’s about controlling the future by controlling what the collective mind is allowed to remember.

The United Kingdom has set forth an ambitious plan known as “Net Zero,” aiming to reach zero net contribution of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. Whether we’re talking about carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, or other greenhouse gases, the stated goal is clear: the UK will not add to global emissions.

On paper, this sounds noble. But the way the plan is being executed reveals a different reality. Rather than truly reducing emissions, the UK has been relocating heavy manufacturing overseas to export-processing zones in the developing world (the world that transnational corporations are underdeveloping) and importing energy from abroad. This strategy doesn’t eliminate the emissions—it merely moves them around geographically.

In practice, this geographic shuffle means that emissions continue at roughly the same level, but now in countries with weaker environmental protections and less-developed capacity to capture or offset carbon. The pollution still enters the atmosphere and affects the global ecosystem. Pretending the UK is somehow insulated from these effects is an illusion.

Yet the problem is not purely environmental. In fact, it isn’t about biospheric integrity at all. Moving high-wage, capital-intensive manufacturing jobs overseas impoverishes the domestic population. The UK has outsourced not only its production but also the livelihoods of its citizens. As industries leave, wages fall, and communities dependent on manufacturing are hollowed out.

The economic harm from offshoring is compounded by mass immigration, which imposes additional costs on the British taxpayer. The government’s welfare systems must now support a growing migrant population while native citizens experience declining purchasing power and reduced living standards. Cheap imports produced by third-world labor may lower the price of some goods, but they cannot compensate for the erosion of secure, well-paid employment at home. (See Marx the Accelerationist: Free Trade and the Radical Case for Protectionism.) Higher energy prices from importation raise the prices of locally produced goods and services.

In short, the transnationalization of production sacrifices the working class without achieving the stated environmental benefits. Pollution levels remain global; only the map of point source emissions changes. The domestic population faces rising taxes, unemployment, weaker wages, higher prices in some sectors, and an increasingly strained welfare state.

All of this raises a question: what is the real purpose of these policies? When examined from a distance, the pattern suggests that “climate change” initiatives like Net Zero are not about saving the environment. Rather, they provide cover for a transnational agenda—offshoring industry to maximize corporate profits by exploiting cheap foreign labor, while also importing cheap labor into the UK itself. This not only disrupts the country’s economic base but also changes its demographic and cultural composition, undermining national solidarity and sovereignty.

Seen this way, which is the way to see it, the Net Zero plan isn’t merely a flawed environmental strategy; it’s part of a broader process by which globalist and transnational corporate interests seize control of government policy to weaken and reshape a country for integration into a larger, post-national order.